Beyond Equiano

Abstract

12 Historically Speaking January/February 2006 Beyond Equiano Jon Sensbach • f course Olaudah Equiano matters. Vincent Carretta contends that the 1 8th century's best-known person of African descent might have been born in South Carolina rather than in West Africa, as Equiano claimed in his autobiography. Whether we agree or not with Carretta—and I find his evidence quite intriguing—we'll read Equiano differently now, and perhaps even more urgently. The possibility that he was born in America makes him more interesting, not less so; it opens up, rather than forecloses, inquiry into the autobiography and the world in which its author moved, giving new vitality to a man who's become something of a stick figure in recent years. For all the layers of meaning in his life's narrative, we'll need to excavate many more now. Whatever his birthplace , his autobiography remains the gold standard for the genre. So, yes, Equiano still matters. At the same time, this new version of his life poses new questions about the 18thcentury black Atlantic that transcend its enigmatic exemplar himself. It's easy to see how Equiano, after being virtually forgotten for 150 years, became an icon again in the late 20th century. For modern students eager to hear the voice ofthe people, his story bears the same authentic witness to the slave trade and African survival as it did for antislavery activists two centuries ago. In our own writing and teaching, he's an irresistible resource, always handy with a quote or anecdote from his amazing "I was there" exploits to make the point for us. What were conditions like during the Middle Passage? Equiano endured them; through his description , we imagine the stench and shudder. How did African captives from different language groups communicate? He overheard their conversations through middlemen and learned several new languages himself; he'll tell us. What was it like for a young Igbo boy in America to hear a book "talk" for the first time? Undergraduates don't have to take the professor's word for it—they can read that memorable passage for themselves. Equiano's autobiography, as Nell Painter has remarked, "works as a kind of founding myth for African-American history," an epic tale of idyllic African life, Atlantic slavery, American self-liberation, and international "A Grand Jamaica ball! or the Creolean hop a Ia muftee; as exhibeted in Spanish Town," 1802. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07200]. leadership for human rights—one man's narrative of progress and redemption that represents the struggles of millions.1 Equiano can be whatever we want him to be, equally popular among historians and literary scholars alike and a convenient bridge between them. When "identity" and "self-fashioning" became the buzzwords of the 1990s for both groups, Equiano furnished the perfect memoir to show how those slippery concepts could be applied to African narrators during the age ofthe slave trade. Above all, as Carretta rightly notes, Equiano is a classic Atlantic creole, that new breed ofpeople shaped not only by the confluence ofAfrica, Europe, and the Americas but by their own movement across and around the ocean between those points, a hybrid transnational group adept at maneuvering among a medley of people, languages, and situations. Creoles embodied a defining irony of the world that produced them. Scholars generally define the "Atlantic world" of the early modern period as the integrated and cohesive product of economic, social, and intellectual capital that flowed in many directions across the ocean—"a unitary whole, a single system," as Philip Morgan has described it.2 Yet the lives ofAtlantic creóles were anything but unified. Deploying multiple identities was their way of negotiating chaos and uncertainty, not coherence . We usually hail that strategy as a positive survival mechanism to cope with a system heavily weighted against them. But while we can applaud the creóles' savvy adaptability, we can forget that they were casualties of the Atlantic system as well, uprooted outcasts grasping for meaning and stability in a world that offered little. In light of Carretta's new version of Equiano's life, then, the question becomes...